One of the ways economists measure income distribution is through the use of “Gini coefficient”. The Gini coefficient measures relative income distribution on  a scale of 0-100.   A Gini of 100 means 1 person has all of the income in a country and everybody else has zero.  A Gini of  zero means everybody in the country gets exactly the same income.

The U.N. Development Program recently came out with a report looking, among other things, at income inequality worldwide.More from BusinessWeek.com:• A Rebound for China and India’s Millionaires• World’s Best and Worst Property Markets• The World’s Best Places to Live 2009The UNDP ranked countries and regions based on a number of factors, including their Gini coefficient, named for Italian statistician Corrado Gini.

The U.S. has a very unequal distribution of income with a Gini of 40.8.  That makes the U.S. the 3rd most unequal distribution among advanced economies, with only Hong Kong and Singapore being more unequal.    via:  Business Week/ Yahoo News